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I don't think is that expensive. For a big house It is pretty affordable, the thing is that I don't think it would erode Shake's market, Apple is the 10000 Punds gorilla so it can do a lot of things including starting a price war that Discreet can't afford

Standalone Toxik is planned just not part of the initial release. It requires extra R&D work to create. Since a lot of the toxik architecture was based on trying to solve data management problems that are really only relevant to multi-user environmenets, this is the way v1 is structured.

We agree that the lack of a standalone version will limit market appeal initially - but we have set our expectations that the first year will be a ramp up year anyway. We know we need a few more things (such as Linux support, which we are also working on) to broaden Toxik's appeal. We are not expecting to sell Toxik by the boatload or even that people will throw out their existing pieplines for Toxik - that would be really unrealistic on our part. Film pipelines do not switch rapidly and so Toxik uses open scripting (python) and data (XML) paradigms so that it can be more easily integrated to the existing workflow and grow from there.

This has generally been the case of v1 products for film. then as they mature their market appeal broadens. Today Toxik offers a few unique things that we feel might be of interest to help augment parts of the creative workflow at some sites. We will focus on broadening our base from there.

Gathered my thoughts a bit more clearly.
What I was trying to say in my previous post is, we've had a variety of non-linear tools for ages, but post has largely remained a "linear" process. For eg, editing has still followed the 'off-line' - 'on-line' - 'audio final mix' path, which means that onlining had to wait for the offline EDL, and audio mix couldn't begin until the online had been completed. Likewise for vfx, basic wire removal would have to preceed blue screen keying etc before the plate could be used in a final comp. Toxik appears to be the first commercially available system that creates a "non-linear" workflow. It's a bit like having your own ILM - Sabre set-up !
Another positive report I've heard is that Toxik doesn't use the stone file system so you're not locked into using stone disk arrays. If you offset this against the initial costs of Toxik I guess you could put a kick-ass system together for a relatively reasonable outlay. Toxik is obviously geared towards the DI / film market and we all know that 2K/4K data eats up disk space at a scary rate.
TW.

Yes, Toxik is sold as software-only and designed to work with standard NAS, SAN or local filesystems. Wiretap will also allow it to read data of other Discreet systems that use the stone filesystem.

Toxik also has a caching mechanism designed to provide greater interactivity to the artist workstation. The cache can be an internal harddrive, or if you want more disk-based playback performance can even be a locally attached FC storage array - the cache runs on the standard filesystem (NTFS in the case of a windows workstation). For stations that do not have sufficient bandwidth images are cached to RAM and region of interest can be used to focus to enable the srtist to maximize the performance of their playback whatever their configuration